PNG’s frontier judges: peacebuilding from the bench

In Papua New Guinea’s most conflict-torn provinces, an unlikely group of actors is stepping into the peacebuilding breach: resident National Court judges. Armed with an unusually expansive constitutional mandate, some of these judges are deploying their powers not just to process the aftermath of violence, but to try to prevent it.

The scale of the challenge is hard to overstate. In Hela and Enga – two of the Highlands provinces hardest hit by inter-group conflict – sophisticated weaponry, warlord networks, and overwhelmed police have combined to produce a crisis that conventional state responses have struggled to contain. Mobile squad deployments, special policing operations and draconian legislative announcements are all being experimented with. But quietly, on the ground, judges are trying something different.

As reported in the Post-Courier on 19 February 2026, Justice Andrew Kostopolous, the resident National Court Judge in Hela, used a court-sanctioned inquiry into tribal fighting and lawlessness to confront the province’s deepening governance crisis head-on. In proceedings marked by unusual candour, he issued bans on alcohol and the public carrying of bush knives, ordered the surrender of firearms, and named specific warlords as criminals subject to immediate arrest.

Justice Kostopolous also issued a human rights violation order against opposing factions in a tribal fight near Tari town, and delivered a stern warning that the province was “teetering on the edge of a constitutional crisis”. “If the police aren’t doing their job, that’s a constitutional crisis,” he said. “If the executive is not doing its job, that’s a constitutional crisis.”

These provisions transform PNG judges from passive arbiters into “social engineers”.

The Supreme Court has affirmed that the Constitution is to be interpreted broadly, as “goal-oriented, purposive” and “liberal”, not in a “strict, technical and legalistic” manner. Judges are urged to “think expansively and to be dynamic” and to “use judicial ingenuity to do justice”.

This is an unusual mandate, though not a unique one: judges in South Africa and India operate under similarly interventionist frameworks.

Three constitutional provisions in PNG are central to this logic. Section 57 empowers the Supreme and National Courts to protect guaranteed rights and freedoms – either on application or on their own initiative. Under this provision judges have summoned police to investigate alleged rights breaches, order the closure of prisons on humanitarian grounds, and directed law enforcement commissioners on the management of their facilities. Critically, Section 57(5) extends this power to cases of “actual or imminent infringement”, allowing courts to make anticipatory orders before a rights breach has fully materialised.

Section 22 grants courts the power to enforce constitutional duties and to formulate procedures and mechanisms where existing frameworks are insufficient. Section 225 obliges state agencies and service providers to actively support constitutional bodies, including the courts themselves.

Taken together, these provisions transform PNG judges from passive arbiters into what legal scholar Bal Kama describes as “social engineers” – actors empowered to identify systemic failures and act to address them.

In Enga, resident judge Justice Graham Ellis has been equally active. In April 2026, he issued a series of orders on his own initiative aimed at stopping tribal fighting in the Laiagam area. These included a ban on carrying machetes and axes in public, the establishment of police roadblocks in the Mulitaka area, and orders for police to arrest anyone breaching National Court directives. He explicitly framed these interventions as a matter of human rights enforcement under Section 57 of the Constitution, noting that the fighting affected rights to life, freedom, protection of the law, freedom of assembly, and freedom of movement.

Justice Ellis’s reasoning is worth quoting at length, because it illuminates the distinctive logic that underpins these interventions:

“In many parts of the world, judges can do no more than consider the effects of criminal conduct, notably conducting trials after it is alleged that a crime has been committed. However, the inclusion of human rights provisions in the Constitution of PNG enables a judge to take a more active role by making orders, where it is considered appropriate, that can try to stop and even prevent criminal conduct.”

Both judges are thinking systemically, not just case by case. Rather than waiting for individual matters to come before them and then ruling on them in isolation, they are using the bench as a vantage point from which to map the conditions generating violence – and to issue orders aimed at disrupting them.

This is a direct challenge to what one judge has described to us as the conventional posture of the justice system: “We tend to come in after everything has happened. We wait until it has happened and then clean up the mess.” The resident judges in Hela and Enga are trying to break out of that reactive mode, using their constitutional powers to intervene before the violence. The judiciary, as Justice Ellis notes, is one of the few arms of the state that carries no obvious political agenda, which may give these interventions a legitimacy that executive actions in PNG often lack.

Courts can direct; they cannot always compel.

None of this is without its difficulties. An editorial in the same issue of the Post-Courier that reported Justice Kostopolous’s human rights violation orders against warring factions in Hela asked who would enforce them – and how – when the court’s own inquiry had been plainly told that police lacked the necessary personnel, resources, and firepower. The enforcement gap is real, and no amount of constitutional creativity can conjure police capacity that does not exist.

There are also institutional tensions. When the Hela provincial government failed to comply with court orders to release vehicles to police for use in addressing tribal fighting, Justice Kostopolous did not hesitate to call it out – but the limits of judicial leverage over executive actors are genuine. Courts can direct; they cannot always compel.

And yet the experiment matters. With PNG’s highlands facing a spiral of violence that conventional responses have not arrested, these judges are demonstrating that the Constitution provides tools for genuine intervention. The effectiveness of their efforts will depend heavily on whether other arms of government – police, provincial administrations, the national executive – choose to treat judicial orders as the floor of their obligations, rather than an inconvenience to be navigated.

What is already clear is that these judges are taking seriously a role that the Constitution always envisaged but that has rarely been tested in quite this way. They are judges on the frontier of peacebuilding. Whether the frontier holds will depend on much more than them.